The Ghost of Grania O'Malley

CONTENTS

Postscript

1
SMILEY

JESSIE WAS ALWAYS FINDING BONES IN THE great bog-oak field where they dug the peat for the winter fires. It was here too that her father found most of the wood he needed for his wood sculptures, his ‘creatures' as she called them. She was forever going off there alone, mooching around, bottom in the air looking for her bones. She had a whole collection of them, but she never tired of looking for more. Mostly they were just sheep bones – skulls, jawbones, legbones, vertebrae. She had shrews' skulls too, birds' skulls, all sorts of skulls. But there was one skull she found that was unlike any other, because it was a human skull. She was quite sure of it.

She never said a word to anyone. She kept it with the rest of her collection in the ruined cottage at the bottom of the bog-oak field. No one but herself ever went near the place. She called him Smiley because he would keep grinning at her. She put Smiley in pride of place in a niche in the cottage wall; and from time to time she'd go and talk to him and tell him her troubles – which were many. Smiley would listen, stare back at her and say nothing, which was what she wanted.

But as time passed, Jessie began to feel more and more uneasy about Smiley. So one day, in confession, she told Father Gerald about her skull, partly because she'd been worrying herself about it, and partly because at the time she could think of no other sins to confess. If she told him she had done nothing wrong, nothing bad enough to confess, he just wouldn't believe her. She'd tried that before. So she blurted it out about Smiley, told him everything; but she could tell from the tone of his voice that he just thought this was another of Jessie Parsons' little white lies.

‘Bones should be buried in hallowed ground and left undisturbed, Jessie,' he said sonorously. ‘Then the souls of the departed can rest in peace.'

So, one dark night with the owl hooting at her from high up in the ruined abbey, she dug a small hole under the abbey walls, said goodbye to Smiley in a whisper, laid him carefully in the wet earth and covered him up. She felt a lot better afterwards; and although she did miss him for a while, she felt pleased with herself that she'd done the right thing.

Some time later Father Gerald had asked after the skull and she'd shown him one of her many sheep's skulls. He'd laughed. ‘It's as I thought, Jessie Parsons, that's never a human being. Do you not know a sheep's skull when you see one?' He'd counted the teeth carefully. ‘I'd say that's a six-year-old ewe, by the teeth in her.'

Jessie went and put flowers on the unmarked grave just once. ‘I hope you're feeling better now, Smiley,' she said. ‘I'll leave you be, so's you can rest in peace, like Father Gerald says.' So she did, and as the weeks and months passed, she thought of Smiley less and less.

All this happened a year or more before the rest of it began.

2
THE BIG HILL

THERE HAD TO BE MIST OR JESSIE WOULD NOT even try it. If she failed, and so far she had always failed, she wanted no one else to know of it, especially her mother and father. She'd lost count of how many times she'd lied to them about the Big Hill, about how she had made it all the way to the top. They mustn't see her. No one must see her. If she was going to fail again, then she would fail alone and unseen.

Old Mister Barney might see her, and probably often did, as she passed his shack at the bottom of the Big Hill, but he'd be the only one; and besides, he wouldn't tell anyone. Mister Barney kept himself to himself and minded his own business. He hardly ever spoke to a soul. Jessie was ten and he had spoken to her maybe half a dozen times in her entire life. He would wave at her through the window sometimes, but she was as sure as she could be that he would never spy on her. He just wasn't like that. There was smoke coming from his chimney and one of the chickens stood one-legged in the porch; but today, as Jessie walked across the clearing outside his shack, there was no sign of Mister Barney.

The mist cut the hill off halfway up and dwarfed it, but Jessie knew what was waiting for her up there, how high it really was, how hard it was going to be, and was daunted by it all over again. Mole, her mother's black donkey, nudged her from behind. Mole would go with her. He went everywhere with her. More than once it had been Mole who had spoilt it, nudging her off balance at just the wrong moment.

There was a lot that annoyed her about her ‘lousy palsy', as she often called it. But it was balance that was the real problem. Once she'd fallen over, it took so much of her energy to get up again that there was little left for the Big Hill itself. If she could just keep her rhythm going – one and two, one and two, one and two – if she could just keep on lurching, and not fall over, she knew that one day, some day, she'd have strength enough to reach the top of the Big Hill, and then she'd never have to lie about it again.

Mole rubbed his nose up against her back. ‘All right, Mole,' said Jessie, clutching the donkey's neck to steady herself. ‘I'm going. I'm going. It's all very well for you. You've got four good legs. I've only got two, and they won't exactly do what I tell them, will they?' She looked up at the Big Hill and took a deep breath. ‘I'm telling you, Mole, today's the day. I can feel it inside me.' The donkey glanced at her and snorted. Jessie laughed. ‘Race you to the top, big ears.'

She started well enough, leaning forward into the hill, willing her fumbling feet forward. She knew every rut and tussock of the track ahead – she'd sat down hard enough on most of them. Mole walked alongside her, browsing in the bracken. After a while he trotted on ahead, all tippy-toed, and disappeared into the mist. ‘Clever clogs!' Jessie called after him, but then she tried all she could to put him out of her mind. She knew she had to concentrate. The path was wet from the mist, and slippery. One false step and she'd be on her bottom and that would be that – again.

She could hear Mole snorting somewhere up ahead. As like as not, he'd be at the waterfall by now. Jessie had reached the waterfall just once, the week before – it was as high as she'd ever gone on her own. That time, too, her legs had let her down. They wouldn't manage the stones and she'd tripped and fallen. She'd tried crawling, but she wasn't any better at crawling than she was at walking. She'd crawled on through the water, become too cold and had had to give up. Today would be different. Today she would not let herself give up. Today she would reach the top, no matter what. Today she would prove to Mrs Burke, to Marion Murphy, and to everyone else at school that she could climb the Big Hill just like they could.

She could see Mole up ahead of her now, drinking in the pool below the waterfall. Jessie's legs ached. She wanted so much to stop, but she knew that she mustn't, that rhythm was everything. She passed Mole and laughed out loud at him. ‘Haven't you read the one about the hare and the tortoise?' she cried. ‘See you at the top.' This was the spot where she'd come to grief the week before, the part of the track she most dreaded. The track rose steeply beside the waterfall, curling away out of sight and around the back of the hill. Every stone was loose here and until she reached the waterfall, if she reached the waterfall, the track would be more like a stream, the stones under her feet more like stepping stones. From now on she would have to be careful, very careful.

She was standing now on the very rock where she'd tripped last time. She punched the air with triumph and staggered on, on and up. She was in unknown territory now. Only on her father's back had she ever gone beyond this point and that was a long time ago when she was small. She felt her legs weakening all the while. She fought them, forcing them on. She breathed in deep, drawing what strength she could from the air, and that was when the mist filled her lungs. She coughed and had to go on coughing. Still she tried to go on.

She felt herself falling and knew she could do nothing about it. She threw her arm out to save herself and was relieved to see she was falling into the water. She would be wet, but at least she wasn't going to hurt herself. But she hadn't accounted for the stone just beneath the surface of the water. She never even felt the cold of the stream as it covered her face. There was an explosion of pain inside her head and a ringing in her ears that seemed as if it would never end. Then the world darkened suddenly around her. She tried to see through it, but she couldn't. She tried to breathe, but she couldn't.

She was dreaming of her father's ‘creature' sculptures. They were all in the cottage and Smiley was telling them a story and they were laughing, cackling like witches. She woke suddenly. She was sitting propped up, her back against a boulder. Mole was grazing some way off, his tail whisking. Jessie's head throbbed and she put her hand to it. There was a lump under her fingers, and it was sticky with blood. There was more blood in her ear and on her cheek too. She was soaked to the skin. She wondered for some moments where she was and how she had got there. She remembered the climb up the Big Hill, and how she had fallen; and she realised then that she had failed yet again. Tears filled her eyes and she cried out loud, her fists clenched, her eyes closed to stop the tears.